There is a point, about halfway into “The Innocent,” when you stop noticing how clever a writer Ian McEwan is. It doesn’t matter anymore that he dawdles strategically at the end of a chapter, slumping briefly into the passive voice. It’s no longer impressive how he knowingly manipulates the boy-meets-girl, spy-versusspy conventions of his story, like a smart kid showing off at the blackboard. After an extraordinary scene where a woman’s dress catches fire, none of McEwan’s adroit writerly bits mean a thing. Because after the fire comes a lethal fight involving the woman, her fiance and her ax-husband in the cramped living room of her tiny apartment. In this gruesome passage–a man’s cheek is bitten off–the printed words on the page disappear, and all you see is what’s happening. For a few vivid moments, it is possible to forget that you are reading a story made up by a stranger. McEwan manages to sustain the emotional pitch for the rest of the book.
Until that moment, “The Innocent” is a more-than-competent tale of espionage interwoven with a love story. A young Englishman named Leonard Marnham becomes enmeshed in a wiretapping operation run against the Russians and East Germans in Berlin in the mid-1950s. At the same time, he falls for a young German woman. Told in alternating chapters, the two narratives mirror each other as Leonard loses his innocence, in both love and the cold war. The parallels are always plainly marked, because McEwan wants us to think we know what’s going on. But we always know less than we think. Leonard’s boss explains that the people working on a classified project have various levels of clearance. Some know more than others: “But the point is this–everybody thinks his clearance is the highest there is, everyone thinks he has the final story.”
The last half of “The Innocent” is so exhaustively suspenseful that it should be devoured at one sitting–the disposal of a corpse has never seemed more arduous. But the story is more than mayhem. McEwan fuses a spy-novel plot with themes as venerable as the myth of Adam and Eve. Sinking in a nether world of spies and lies and murder, Leonard Marnham survives only by acknowledging his own complicity. As McEwan writes, “Now that he could name the fog he had been moving through, he was at last visible to himself.”
